Songoftheday 5/23/19 - I sit around and watch the tube but nothing's on, I change the channels for an hour or two...
from the album Dookie (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: Ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 airplay peak: #36 (one week)
Weeks in the Hot 100 airplay chart: 2
Today's song of the day comes from the seminal pop-punk band Green Day. First started by childhood friends Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt along with drummer John Kiffmeyer while they were still in their teens as Sweet Children in the East Bay area of California east of San Francisco and Oakland, the trio changed their name to Green Day as they released their debut EP 1000 Hours in 1989. A year later, they put out a proper full-length album, 39/Smooth (which would eventually get repackaged as 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours to include material from their EPs), which was locally successful, but still on the edge of the punk scene. After touring behind the album Kiffmeyer left to go to college, to be replaced by Tre Cool, who would complete the trio's lineup that has stayed intact to this day. With Cool they completed their sophomore effort, Kerplunk, which was infinitely more refined (for a punk record) and gained the band enough buzz to get them signed to a major label, Reprise Records. Hiring Rob Cavallo to produce them, Green Day finally emerged with their third full-length disc Dookie at the beginning of 1994. The lead single from the record, "Longview", named for the street he lived on in East Bay, doesn't even have that name in the lyrics, but instead is a fast paced rant on being a lonely loser whose only motives were weed and wacking off. But the memorable chorus and bass hook took MTV and radio by storm no matter...
Since "Longview" wasn't released as a physical single, it was excluded from Billboard magazine's Hot 100 pop chart, but it gained enough airplay on mainstream radio stations to climb into the top-40 of the airplay component of the list in June of 1994. However, on rock radio the song was a big hit and had no rules to qualify for the chart, and this spent a week at #1 on the Modern Rock list and peaked at #13 on the Mainstream Rock tally. Internationally the single was released commercially and made the top-40 in the UK (#30) and Australia (#33). At the Grammy Awards the following year, the band won for Best Alternative Music Performance for the Dookie album, while "Longview" was also nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance (which went to Soundgarden for "Black Hole Sun"). Green Day also were in for Best New Artist that year, but Sheryl Crow took that prize.
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Here's the trio live in concert in Chicago in 1994...
And next up another early concert in Washington...
Fast forward to 2011 after they reached their peak...
and lastly, from their intimate AOL Sessions show in 2004...
Up tomorrow: The Queen Of Soul suffers a cheater just a little.
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